The supporting cast of Beirut’s old Bliss Street

AUB's Main Gate

Faisal Restaurant, sitting opposite the AUB Main Gate, was the megastar of Beirut’s old Bliss Street in the Fifties and Sixties (see yesterday’s post). Its supporting cast, positioned on its access way, was as convivial:

BAKERY

Al-Afran al-Wataniyya is the bakery a stone’s throw away from Faisal’s.

Born over 60 years ago, it is still going strong today. It survived most other businesses on Bliss Street.

It bakes first-class Arabic bread, dull oriental petit four and exceptional manakeesh (plural of mankoushe).

The time-honored mankoushe is a Lebanese flatbread topped with a mixture of pounded thyme, sesame seeds and spiced olive oil. It is baked until crisp in a commercial wood-fired oven. You can have a mankoushe for breakfast, as a midmorning brunch or as an afternoon snack.

It sold for one quarter of a Lebanese lira and was wrapped in a newspaper sheet. It currently sells for 4,000 to 5,000 times as much and is wrapped in a sandwich paper. I think it smelled and tasted better in the old wrapping.

A mankoushe is what I had every day for breakfast in the 14 months I worked as news bulletin editor for The Associated Press when still an undergraduate.

KHAYAT’S

The bookstore by that name had a wide range of titles and references in English and Arabic. It was run as a small family business and catered mostly to the AUB community.

Being close to the university’s main entrance, it had the advantage of location.

Two other Beirut bookstores, Librairie Antoine and Librairie du Liban, were better stocked in French titles.

Khayat’s also leased a successful stationery shop on AUB campus grounds.  Based almost under the famed Milk Bar, it filled part of the West Hall basement, right opposite the student mailboxes area.

1964: Aram's shop sign in Arabic is hardly visible on the left as tram rolls past Faisal's facade

BILLIARD HALL

Aram, a bespectacled, rosy-cheeked and awfully decent Lebanese Armenian ran a billiard hall, that everyone simply called Aram’s, just next to Faisal’s. University students and their friends spent endless hours at Aram’s playing billiards, card games, pinball, foosball and backgammon.

One late afternoon, I was at Aram’s enjoying a round of backgammon with a handful of friends, including Faisal Restaurant part owner Farid Saadeh.

Three policemen, probably acting on a vindictive tip-off, walked in and asked to speak to Aram. When staff told them he was not there, they said they had to “question the five gamblers” seated around the backgammon board. They ordered us to carry the backgammon board, the 30 checkers and the pair of dice and follow them to the nearby Hobeish Police Station.

Instead of being “questioned,” we were locked up in a cell and told the “investigator” will decide about “charges.”

It turned out “investigators” reviewed “arrest cases” with police station chiefs twice daily over the telephone. Sadly, ours had already made his late afternoon call when we were held. It meant we had to wait for his morning call. Early next morning, the “investigator” decided not to bring charges and ordered our release. We were free to go!

PRIVATE CAR HIRE

In the Fifties and Sixties, five or six stalwarts from the Itani, Shatila and Shehab families of Ras Beirut cobbled together in the narrow alleyway separating Aram’s and Faisal’s to run a private car hire business.

Each owned his bottom of the range Fiat saloon that students could hire by the hour. So long as you were a “familiar face,” there were no papers to sign to rent a car, no documents to produce, no deposit to make, no penalty charges, no mileage limits, no pickup or drop off points – nothing. You just rented the car from one of Itanis, Shatilas or Shehabs at the agreed hourly rate and got on your way.

One member of the ingenious lot was Tewfik Itani.

He was short, skinny and good-humored.

His Achilles' heel was horseracing. Whatever money he made during the week, he would gamble away at the racetrack over the weekend.

Most weekends I sat at Faisal’s around sunset and usually saw him get off the tram at the station opposite and cross the street to his car hire point. I could tell from the expression on his face how he fared at the racetrack. When he looked too somber, I turned my face away, pretending not to see him.

On one such occasion, he came into Faisal’s, passed by my table and intimated he wanted a drink. I told the waiter I will pay for his order. Moments later, Tewfik walked out with a tray holding a small flask of arak and a couple of appetizers. He placed the tray on the fringe of Faisal’s glass façade and went about the ritual of sipping his arak and nibbling. He looked my way occasionally and raised his glass in a toast.

In under an hour, he walked back in, returned the tray to the counter, approached my table, leaned over and said, “I have a couplet for you.”

He blurted it out in colloquial Arabic:

Praise to God for my health and poverty

Lenders hound me but I hound nobody

If I survive, I’ll repay every man

But if I die, s**t will hit their fan

NEWSPAPER STAND

Khattab, a smart middle-aged but gray-haired man, was allowed by Faisal’s owners to plant his array of newspapers and magazines on one side of the restaurant’s entrance.

University students, faculty and staff bought their preferred dailies or weeklies from Khattab. He knew who read what by heart. He prepared to give you your newspaper when he saw you coming.

In the Nasserite period, you placed a “standing order” with Khattab to get your Friday weekend edition of Cairo’s official daily al-Ahram. It carried the fabled “Frankly Speaking” column of Mohamed Hassanein Heikal.

You also needed to order your copies of Rose el-Youssef and Sabah el-Khair. The two sister Egyptian weeklies carried the columns of Ihsan Abdul Quddous and Ahmad Bahaeddin and excerpts from the former’s brilliant novel, “The Empty Pillow.”

SANDWICH SHOP

The six square meter sandwich and refreshments shop of Jubran and Beshara Bikhazi next to Faisal’s was a crowd-getter any time of day. They served the world’s tastiest makanek sandwich. Makanek is the local version of spiced beef sausages.

SHOE SHINER

On the Bikhazis’ doorway sat Garabet, a pint-sized, stocky and bald Armenian shoe shiner who donned a knit Bobble hat at all times.

He sat on a tiny chair opposite a modest wooden shoeshine box holding the full range of brown, black and neutral Kiwi polish, shine brushes and buffing cloths.

If you wanted to step in or out of the university in a squeaky pair of shoes, you would head straight to Garabet. The reach of his arms was so limited that he seemed to “hug” the shoe when brushing it.

The shoeshine cost LL. 0.25 and Garabet worked nonstop in daytime, making good money. But his addiction to betting on horses at the bookie next door meant he squandered it all.

His wife – who was of the same height but double his size – eventually decided she had had enough of his betting addiction.

You think she checked him into rehab? There wasn’t one anyway! She simply got herself a tiny shoeshine chair and sat next to him with her left shoulder glued to his back. The missus started to pocket his earnings straightaway. It wasn’t long before Garabet turned into a reformed gambler.

BARBERSHOP

Two or three feet from Garabet’s spot stood the old fashion walk-in barbershop of Salim Jerdak.

It was a six-square meter salon where guys got distinctively male haircuts, hot lather shaves with straight razor and mustache and beard trims. It was also the place to catch up on events.

Other barbershops on the old Bliss were fancier and roomier. This one only had two facing mirror walls, three orthodox barber chairs and a waiting bench.

Soft-spoken Mouallem (Master) Salim staffed the chair at the entrance. Jovial Jean, a short blond Armenian, was in charge of the middle chair. Chatty Ibrahim, who always styled his black hair with Brylcreem, controlled the third and last chair.

The barbershop would not have been as enjoyable without a companion. The late Issam Chafic Ariss, God bless his soul, and I were playmates for years before becoming classmates at university. His mother prepared us sandwiches after our horseplay on the streets. Later, in our high school years, we met in the afternoons at his father Chafic’s posh home lighting store to watch foot traffic on Bab Edriss.

Our first joint walk-in to the barbershop was for a haircut. Gradually, we started going there for smooth face shaves. That’s when Issam introduced me to “Pour un Homme de Caron,” an aftershave he bought at Amatoury on Bab Edriss and brought to Salim’s. I have used the fragrance since. It is now the signature scent of Tom Ford.

Move the time machine forward to the late Seventies and you find Salim’s daughter Huda working for me at Monday Morning, the English-language weekly magazine I launched in Beirut in 1972.

Leila Baroody, daughter of Faisal’s Elias Baroody, preceded her there. Leila and Huda were the first in the region to master the Electronic "Selectric" Composer, an automated, direct impression composition unit introduced by IBM in January 1975, one of which I acquired for Monday Morning shortly thereafter.

UNCLE SAM’S

Uncle Sam’s restaurant was Faisal’s nemesis: Americanism versus Arabism, community banter versus serious political conversation, hamburger versus hummus, male students wooing birds versus male students debating ideologies.

Uncle Sam’s was the first diner in Lebanon to epitomize all things American – hotdogs, hamburgers, grilled ham and cheese, doughnuts, waffles, pancakes, chocolate mud, milkshakes, apple pies, percolated American coffee etc.

The owners were Sami Khoury and Misbah Shatila, both stocky and short and both looking daggers at loudmouthed customers.

But two welcoming waiters made up for what the co-owners lacked in subtlety -- ageing Abu Zakkoor and macho Salim (some coeds were secretly obsessed with him).

The tall story among male students in the sixties was that Uncle Sam’s is the best place to convince your swan to sunbathe at AUB’s rocky beach where you can examine her figure in a swimsuit…

When Beirut’s old Bliss Street epitomized the Arab world

The late Nadia Tueni

Each street in Beirut has a story to put across and the older the street the more stories it can pass on.

Beirut was best described in a poem written in French by Nadia Tueni (1935-1983).

Born to a Lebanese father and a French mother, she was the 1973 Académie Française poet laureate. Lines I paraphrased from Tueini’s poem titled “Beyrouth”:

… In Beirut, each idea lodges in a house

In Beirut, thoughts and caravans are disgorged…

Whether she is a nun, a witch

Or both…

Whether adored or cursed…

Whether soaked in blood or holy water

Whether she’s guiltless or murderous

Phoenician, Arab or a touring car…

Beirut is the Orient’s last sanctuary

Where Man can always don the color of light

No place in Beirut is a greater repository of “thoughts and caravans” than Bliss Street of old. Its nerve center was the modest Faisal Restaurant. The now-defunct eatery was indeed the “last sanctuary” for the pan-Arab intelligentsia.

The street is named after Dr. Daniel Bliss, the American missionary who founded the American University of Beirut in 1866. It runs in a straight line for hardly a kilometer along one side of the AUB campus. It starts at the university’s Medical Gate, goes past its Main Gate and ends at Ras el-Khatt, or “end of the (tramway) line.” But the tramline connecting Furn el-Shebbak to Manara at the tail end of Bliss was discontinued in 1963.

The Bliss Street marker for nearly 50 years was Faisal Restaurant. Its fame peaked between 1950 and 1970, when it became the unbound melting pot for the cream of Lebanese and Arab society. Students, activists, scholars, intellectuals and politicians all met unhindered at Faisal’s (frequently in my presence and involvement) to debate cataclysmic events swamping the Arab world. Among them:

• Fallouts of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and exodus of 750,000 Palestinian refugees to neighboring Arab states;
• Assassination of Jordan’s King Abdallah (1951);
• Death of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdelaziz Al Saud (1953), ouster of King Saud (1964) and his replacement by King Faisal;
• Accession to independence of Libya, Oman, Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Kuwait and South Yemen;
• Military coups in Syria (1949 through 1970), Egypt (1952), Sudan (1958, 1964, 1969), Iraq (1958), Yemen (1962), Algeria (1965) and Libya (1969);
• Rise of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel-Nasser (1952) and his death (1970);
• Nationalization of the Suez Canal (1956) followed by the Suez Campaign;
• Algeria’s War of Independence (1954-1962 );
• Revolt in Lebanon and US Marines’ deployment in Beirut (1958)
• Birth and later (1961) collapse of the merger between Syria and Egypt in the United Arab Republic;
• The Arabs’ loss of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights to Israel in the 1967 war;
• Birth of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960 and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) four years later;
• Egypt's military adventure in Yemen;
• Election of Yasser Arafat as PLO chairman (1969) and “Black September” (1970) in Jordan;
• “War of Attrition” (1968-1970) between Egypt and Israel along the Suez Canal;
• Sequels of the 1955 “Baghdad Pact,” the 1957 “Eisenhower Doctrine” and the 1970 “Rogers Plan.”

It is claimed that if someone asked for directions to the Main Gate, the answer came, “Facing Faisal’s.” Another legend suggests that when Gamal Abdel-Nasser in his heyday wanted to gauge the Arab street mood, he would ask to be briefed on the atmosphere at Faisal’s.

Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, center stage at Faisal’s belonged to the soft-spoken Monah el-Solh, Lebanon and the Arab world’s tireless éminence grise.

The late Nabil Khoury

No writer captured Faisal’s relevance to the Arab world better than Nabil Khoury (1929-2002). He was the brilliant journalist, communicator, essayist and author next door. In the midfifties, he and his wife Marcelle rented a flat right above ours in the Faddoul Building close to the Commodore Hotel in Ras Beirut. I was still at university then, but he was already working his way up to become head of programming at Radio Lebanon. He set up and edited a women’s magazine, al-Hasna’, and served as editor in chief of Lebanon’s leading political weekly, al-Hawadeth, before moving out to Paris. In 1977, he launched from Paris a prestigious pan-Arab magazine, al-Mustaqbal. I saw him last when I visited his plush Paris offices around that time.

Shortly after the Lebanon civil war brought down the curtain on Faisal’s in end-June 1978, Nabil Khoury wrote a succinct commentary of fewer than 200 words. It read more like an obituary of the Arab world than a graveside eulogy of the restaurant.

My translation from Arabic of Khoury’s piece titled “Faisal Restaurant”:

Freedom of Speech was the favorite food at Faisal’s…

Reading a book was immaterial. More important was to hear what was said about it at Faisal’s…

No one was judged an author or journalist before being recognized as such by Faisal’s inner circle. It was easier to win a degree from AUB across the street…

You entered Faisal’s as a student, spending your first years as a listener before you were allowed to join the dialogue

Dialogue in the morning…

Dialogue at noontime…

Dialogue in the evening…

All the paradoxes of the Arab world, all its [political] parties and their ideologies, and all its VIPs… used to hang violence [in the cloakroom] alongside their coats before entering the civility of dialogue

You met a hundred people in Arab capitals who would tell you, “I know you from school or university”…

You met a thousand who would say, “ We know you from Faisal’s”…

It was the Arab world’s biggest [political] party…

It was the Arab unity that foundered…

It was the pan-Arab parliament… that is now on its deathbed

It was the unborn Arab democracy

It was the backbone of a nation stretching from the [Atlantic] Ocean to the [Arabian] Gulf -- a place where the revolutionary rested and the big shot dropped a size

So long as you were outside [Faisal’s] you dreaded speaking, but once inside… you were secure

It’s the Arab world that slipped away with no one present to bid it farewell…

No one hurled a funeral flower at its internment because most were either faraway or exiled…!

But tens of thousands mourned it with tears

It was the last bridge, the bridge of no return.

Tewfik Saadeh founded Faisal’s around 1919. He was a native of Ain Saadeh, a village in Lebanon’s Metn district.  The name "Ain Saadeh" refers to the town's natural spring and means "Spring of Happiness." On his death, ownership of the restaurant passed to his son Farid.

The night of Gen. Fuad Chehab’s election as president of Lebanon on 31 July 1958, ending by it the 1958 uprising, Farid invited me for a drink in Brummana. On the way back to Beirut in his car, we were stopped at a militia barrier near Sinn el-Feel and asked for our IDs. The militiaman who checked Farid’s ID told him, “You can go.” The one who checked mine told me, “You’re under arrest.” An exchange between the pair then went like this:

-- “Why are you arresting the passenger? The driver (Farid) is Christian and from Ain Saadeh.”

-- “This one here is Moslem and from Mazraa and you want me to let him go?”

-- “We leave together or stay together,” Farid told the men manning the barrier. A typical Lebanese compromise was reached: we would be escorted together under arms and placed under house arrest at the nearby home of Farid’s widowed mother. After 18 hours there, the Lebanese army took over and dismantled militia barriers throughout the country. We were free to go.

Farid married and settled late in life after living for several years in a first floor flat almost above Faisal’s. He was a charming bon viveur. He liked his liquor, enjoyed card games (Bido, Poker and Quatorze), appreciated sports cars (he drove a stunning 1955 Ford Thunderbird convertible) and loved Spanish women, which is why he was so fluent in Spanish. Funding that lifestyle drove him to sell part of Faisal’s title to George Baroody, who steadied his hand. The latter also took over the day-to-day management of the restaurant with help from his brother Elias Baroody and a quasi-accountant, Emile Shu’aib.

Faisal’s four lasting waiters were an ageing Michel, a burly Ameen, a wily Nayef and an amusing Anwar. They were the AUBites’ friends, consultants, food advisors, and small moneylenders on occasion.

One sidesplitting story about Anwar: He was serving three regulars sitting around a table for four. All asked for Turkish coffee. One wanted it “sweet,” the other “medium” and the third “without sugar.” Anwar disappeared for a few minutes and came back with three cups and one cezve (ركوة). He served the student who wanted coffee “without sugar” first. He then shook the cezve gently and served the “medium” before giving the cezve a good shake and serving the “sweet.” He explained later that he did not stir the sugar at all when preparing the coffee. He thought it was easier to let the sugar settle at the bottom of the cezve and control the degree of sweetness with a shake.

(More faces and places on the old Bliss Street in the next post)